Free Republic

Federal immigration agents are escalating efforts to crack down on businesses hiring undocumented workers. New data released Friday morning shows Immigration and Customs Enforcement visited 122 businesses over the past five days, mostly in Southern California. Mike Poindexter is CEO of his family business the Poindexter Nut Company near Fresno, California. He says most Americans don't want these labor-intensive jobs. "We hire people all the time. They show up, they work two days and they leave," Poindexter said. His company is now being audited by ICE. "We've had somewhere between 5 to 10 percent of our workforce quit voluntarily just...

President Trump issued his first veto threat of the immigration debate on Thursday, with the White House saying the plan being offered by Senate Democratic leaders and a handful of GOP rebels would make border security worse, not better. In a statement from press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House said the plan would prevent agents from going after illegal immigrants unless they arrive after June 30, 2018. Analysts have said that creates an incentive for people to flood the border now, hoping to get into the U.S. before the deadline — and it also protects perhaps 10 million...

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are reportedly in the process of a large-scale sweep in the Los Angeles area. Make no mistake that LA is the belly of the beast when it comes to illegal aliens and with the presence of untold numbers of street gangs, it is a potential motherlode for rounding up those with criminal records.

House GOP leaders are forging ahead with their own hardline immigration bill, as the Senate threw in the towel Thursday on legislation to protect hundreds of thousands of young, undocumented immigrants from deportation. The main author of the House bill, Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), said Thursday that he’s building support for his measure, even as other GOP colleagues said an initial vote tally this week was well below the 218 votes needed to pass the bill. Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) “instructions to me are ‘get this bill done,’ and we’re working hard to accomplish that,” Goodlatte said in an...

The Schumer-Rounds-Collins immigration bill would be a total catastrophe. @DHSgov says it would be “the end of immigration enforcement in America.” It creates a giant amnesty (including for dangerous criminals), doesn’t build the wall, expands chain migration, keeps the visa... lottery, continues deadly catch-and-release, and bars enforcement even for FUTURE illegal immigrants. Voting for this amendment would be a vote AGAINST law enforcement, and a vote FOR open borders. If Dems are actually serious about DACA, they should support the Grassley bill!

The Senate on Thursday rejected immigration legislation crafted by centrists in both parties after President Trump threatened to veto the bill if it made it to his desk. In a 54-45 vote, the Senate failed to advance the legislation from eight Republican, seven Democratic and one Independent senators. It needed 60 votes to overcome a procedural hurdle.

A divided 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday held as unconstitutional President Donald Trump's anti-terrorist travel ban from eight countries, six of them majority-Muslim with a total population of 150 million. In a 9-4 vote, the Richmond-based court upheld a Maryland district judge's preliminary injunction against the ban taking full effect and ruled that the travel restrictions violate the Constitution's Establishment Clause, which bars the government establishment of a religion. “In sum, the face of the Proclamation, read in the context of President Trump’s official statements, fails to demonstrate a primarily secular purpose. To the objective observer, the...

Apparently having grown tired of waiting for the federal government to “do something” about immigration reform, some Colorado lawmakers have come up with an alternate solution. Some Democrats in the state legislature have a plan which would allow the state to issue their own “purple cards” (a state-level version of a green card), offering legal status to well-behaved illegal aliens. Right up front, I’ll just say that I hope they pass this law because watching the legal challenges and fallout should be either informative or hilarious. (CBS Denver) Colorado would have its own version of a “green card” under legislation...

Variety reported on Monday about Disney chairman and CEO Bob Iger hosting a fundraiser next week for six vulnerable Democrat senators. Although the story did point out the irony of Disney pushing for the tax cuts that every one of the senators voted against, it skipped the more controversial detail that the senators would be receiving money from a fundraiser hosted by an executive who pushed for replacing American Disney employees with H1B visa foreign workers.  First let us go to the irony of a tax cut supporting company supporting senators who all opposed that tax cut in Bob Iger to...

There are few things in Washington that everyone agrees on – ask a Democrat and a Republican what the weather is like and you’re likely to get complete different answers. But there is one thing they all agree on: the current immigration system is messed up. I don’t use the popular word “broken” because something isn’t really broken when so many people simply ignore it. That’s the biggest problem with the immigration system, cities and states (and for decades the federal government) have ignored the law and are implementing their will instead. A major part of the appeal of Donald...

Sen. Ted Cruz said Thursday that if Republicans pass an immigration plan that allows citizenship they will lose the majority in Congress this November. “Mark my words, if Republican majorities in Congress pass citizenship for millions of people, do amnesty, I think it is quite likely we will lose both houses of Congress,” Mr. Cruz, Texas Republican, said on Fox News.

More than a dozen advocacy groups issued a warning about traveling in Florida on Wednesday saying immigration arrests there have soared more rapidly in the past year than in any other area of the country. Leaders from immigrant rights and nonprofit organizations said new cooperation between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and 17 Florida sheriffs is also spreading fear in the state. The travel advisory issued by 15 groups warns immigrants from other states to reconsider Florida trips or to be ready to encounter immigration agents at airports, sea ports and bus stations.

A broad bipartisan group of senators reached agreement Wednesday on a narrow rewrite of the nation’s immigration laws that would bolster border security and resolve the fate of the so-called Dreamers, even as President Trump suggested he would veto any plan that does not adhere to his harder-line approach. Their compromise legislation sets up a clash pitting the political center of the Senate against Mr. Trump and the Republican congressional leadership. Senators in both parties have been racing against a self-imposed end-of-the-week deadline to write legislation that could win wide support by increasing border security while at the same time...

WINSTON SALEM (AP/WNCN) - Authorities say a man accused of drunken driving in a fatal ambulance crash in North Carolina is subject to deportation pending the criminal case’s outcome. **SNIP** Police say Romero’s car hit the ambulance carrying a 3-year-old boy and his mother, causing it to overturn. Police found the ambulance overturned on the curb of U.S. 52 southbound near the Liberty Street exit around 1:15 a.m. Sunday, WFMY reported. The boy later died in a hospital. Three adults on the ambulance had minor injuries, according to the TV station.

His family says he was so petrified of being deported that a minor traffic accident sent him to suicide. We may never know for certain. Now they are mourning his loss and getting out the message of what they say living in fear can do to a person. His friends called him 'Trippy', his name was Luis Castenada, a 40-year-old father of two originally from Guatemala. The story is he came, one of eight kids, as an undocumented immigrant to this country as a young boy. His story ended this past Friday night in the San Fernando Valley when he...

President Trump on Wednesday called on lawmakers to oppose a series of bipartisan efforts to address immigration and resolve the fate of the so-called “Dreamers,” demanding fealty to his hard-line approach even as more moderate senators converged on a narrower approach. Senators in both parties are racing against a self-imposed, end-of-the-week deadline to write legislation that could win broad support by increasing border security while at the same time offering a path to citizenship for immigrants brought to the United States as children. Members of a bipartisan group calling itself the Common Sense Coalition said they have reached a deal...

LAKELAND, FL (The Miami Herald) – Pleading guilty to putting lye in sauce led to a seven-year prison sentence for a Florida restaurant worker — and possibly more punitive action at the federal level. Margarito Padilla began serving his sentence Monday, according to Florida Department of Corrections records. On Tuesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Tampa office filed a detainer on the 54-year-old Guadalajara, Mexico, native, meaning ICE wants to know when Padilla finishes doing his time.... [snip] “DANGER POISON HARMFUL OR FATAL IF SWALLOWED CAUSES SEVERE BURNS.”

Congressional Republicans threw fiscal sanity out the window last week, so it comes as no surprise that the immigration bill introduced in the Senate Wednesday comes with an eye-popping price tag of nearly $100 billion. But what may surprise conservatives who believe in President Trump’s America First campaign message is that this bill spends twice as much on foreign aid as it does on border security. The Trump-endorsed plan proposed by Senator Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, includes $25 billion for a “Border Security Enforcement Fund,” $18 billion of which is appropriated for “tactical infrastructure.” But in a section titled “Foreign Migration...

A bipartisan group of senators on Wednesday said they have reached an immigration deal as lawmakers try to break a logjam on the Senate's debate. "It's going to be ready today. It's going to be ready today," Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told reporters after a closed-door meeting. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who was also in the meeting, confirmed that they would be releasing an agreement on Wednesday saying members were working to "tidy up the language." But members remained tight-lipped about the content of the deal and if it would line up with President Trump's demands that any agreement include...

The raw emotions generated by immigration policy—provoked by heartrending stories of families torn apart by deportation, or citizens murdered by illegal immigrants—have scrambled political allegiances and confused public debate. Republicans, usually the champions of family values and small government, now want to restrict family reunification and give bureaucrats the power to screen people who want to enter the country. Democrats, traditionally the allies of the working class, want big business to select immigrants and have given scant attention to the legitimate interests of working-class natives. The only way to end this politically charged debate is to think carefully about benefits...